I really like to teach, try to explain things in a simple manner. There is often no better way of making an explanation than visualizing it.
The problem is that I really can't draw, especially on a computer.
Wouldn't it be awesome if I could make the computer draw for me ?
I found out that, unsurprisingly, there is a software for that already. The one I like is called mermaid - it renders a simple text description of a graph or diagram into an html representation. Can look something like this.

graph TB
subgraph one
a1-->a2
end
subgraph two
b1-->b2
end
subgraph three
c1-->c2
end
c1-->a2

This blog is rendered by Nikola hence I would like to show you how I've added mermaid support to my Nikola installation.
I use USE_BUNDLES = False in conf.py as for it gives me more control and is more HTTP/2 friendly.
With that disabled I can include mermaid's style and js files like so (also in conf.py):

Where do all these files come from though ? In my case, I have a custom theme, based on zen called zen-cyplo. The assets in the sources are located under themes/zen-cyplo/assets/.
Oh, and cloneCssStyles: false is there as the default of true made the different css styles on my blog clash.
Finally, to use mermaid in the post do (for reStructured Text):

..raw:: html
<div class="mermaid">
graph TB
subgraph one
a1-->a2
end
subgraph two
b1-->b2
end
subgraph three
c1-->c2
end
c1-->a2
</div>

You can click on source button located below the title of this post to see it in action. If you are interested in the build process and how all these come together - the complete sources for this blog are hosted under https://github.com/cyplo/blog

I've recently switched to a setup where I do all my builds for this blog on Travis. While doing so I needed to migrate away from using Netlify's internal build infrastructure. This resulted in a quick python script that allows you to upload arbitrary directory tree to Netlify and does so using their incremental deployment API. All that means that while this site is quite big in size the deployments go rather quickly ! There are some known issues but apart from them the script should just work for any custom Netlify deployment you would like to have. I use it on this very site, to have a preview of any PR before merging it as well as for deploying the main site after the PR is merged. I hope you will find it useful and please do not hesitate if you want to post an issue or a PR !

I am quite bad at remembering how to launch docker to have everything set up correctly. Hence the following - a script that launches any commandline specified in its arguments inside a new docker container. Current directory is mounted inside the container automatically, so the thing you are executing can have its local dependencies satisfied.

I use vanilla Debian Jessie as a run platform there, mostly because this is what most of my servers run.
The script covers setting up SELinux and mounting the directory from which it is run as /mnt inside the container while also having the default non-root user added.

I use Fedora as my main OS, which, it turns out, has some pretty nice SELinux settings. These deny access from inside the container to the outside.
Said Fedora consists mostly of almost-newest-but-stable everything though, which makes Docker to be in a fairly recent version.
A version that understands how to change a SELinux context for the directory we're mounting, by itself !
You need at least Docker v1.7 for this.

I went to RustFest and it was amazing !

It was clearly the best conference organizational-wise I've been to so far.
It made me think of what I really liked there. What made it so awesome and welcomy ?
To me this was a large number of small things just coming together. I listing them here for me to remember and for others to use.
Let's make conferences at least this friendly, together !

Before the event:

very clear emails, repeating messages couple of times in different emails for the important stuff

maps of the popular routes provided, e.g. from the airport and bus station

supporter ticket sale - two times the price - you pay for another person that wouldn't be able to get a ticket otherwise

survey on dietary requirements/allergies

survey on childcare needs

clear statement of the code of conduct for the conference

During the event:

very good MC person

keeping people entertained through the tech breaks

keeping tabs on the talk length, allowing appropriate amount of questions if the time allowed

live captioning of all talks - small screen outside of the view of the main screen with the text live

getting the next speaker prepared and mic-tested before the end of the current talk

quiet room to rest with clear rules on no talking and interrupting there

clear signage for the different parts of the venue (washrooms, quiet room, party space etc)

washrooms

all same, ungendered

basic items for free in said washrooms

chewing gum

tooth paste

tampons, pads

baby wipes

info desk/registration

clear info during registration, handing out programme

asking people if they want to be on the photos - giving out lanyards accordingly - flashy red lanyards for people who do not want photos of them taken

As this article is by far the most popular on my site right now I feel that an update is necessary, as the landscape evolved a bit since the original publish date.

Conemu started to support Bash on Windows properly now and this is what I settled on in the end.

The article below is still relevant for the running X applications on Windows part though.

I've been playing a bit with
GNU/kWindows a.k.a.
Bash on Windows a.k.a Windows Subsystem for Linux (Beta). I was
especially interested whether I can use my regular Linux
dotfiles to recreate my working
environment of zsh + tmux + vim. The biggest troubles I had were with
the terminal emulator. While the default one, invoked by saying bash
is much better than powershell or cmd.exe already - it lacks some things
I've learned to rely on, like 256-colour palette support. Thus the
search for the ultimate terminal emulator begun. I tried ConEmu,
cmder and their spinoffs to no avail. Either the colours were
lacking, or the emulator would swallow up certain strokes like the arrow
keys. Then I thought - hey, I use terminator on Linux, maybe it
would be possible to use it here as well. To my surprise the answer was - yes !

The font rendering is not ideal and the borderless mode does
not work, but hey, it is quite usable nonetheless ! It even has
bidirectional clipboard sharing with Windows' windows, which is good.
P.S. konsole and gnome-terminal do seem to have troubles launching
(crashy-crashes there)

Go to conferences. It's good for you.

Ever wondered why to go to conferences ? Is it worth it, especially if
you do not feel
confident
that the conference is on something that would be in an immediate realm
of your day-to-day interests ? Just go ! You might end up learning
something and meeting new people. And new people mean more variables to
mix up your life. A bit scary, I know. Still worth it though. Wondered
what conference in Europe are weird enough so people wouldn't mind
having another misfit ? Here you go.

nucl.ai

Now imagine something niche within the industry. To me, AI comes to
mind. Mages in robes in their towers, sending out autonomous robot
armies against each other. Right ? There's a conference for that ! At
nucl.ai, in July, in Vienna, you can meet AI
professionals from academia and industry alike, most of them coming from
game development background. The atmosphere is very newcomer-friendly,
the only requirement is that you're interested in AI, not necessarily
having anything to do with it professionally. Petra and Alex, the
organizers, are wonderful people that make this conference quite unique.
It's happy fun to see ideas floating from academia to the industry and
vice versa. Don't forget the presentations on work-in-progress major AAA
games ! I've learned there that the everyday programming in the games
industry is quite different than the one I do in terms of best practices
and patterns. Definitely worth a try !

Erlang User Conference

Speaking of something completely different. Erlang ! Was functional
before being functional was considered
cool. Very practical,
very fast, parallelize everything ! Processes everywhere ! Message
passing ! Want to feel the groove as well ? Visit Stockholm in September
for Erlang User Conference. Meet
creators of the language, talk about massive scale deployments. Other FP
languages are welcome. I would even say, the more strange the better.
Idris seems to be the topic of interest
as well. Eat good food, walk the city of dynamite. Erlang has a quite
close-knit community which gives you this warm family feeling.

SoCraTes

Speaking of family. There's a family of conferences known as
SoCraTes. Software
Crafstmanship and Testing. SoCraTes. Get it ? :D As it's more than one
conference a year, it's harder to go to all of them. I only went to
Codefreeze, in Finland, in January, and
only once, but loved it already. Codefreeze, Finland, in January. Get it
?! :D First thing is that you don't know what will happen there. You
just go, meet the people and then you sit down and everyone talks about
what they would like to learn and what they can share. This way you come
up with some loose agenda you follow more or less. One track, very
intense. Talking, swimming in ice water, learning, sauna going. Very
intimate feel, not many people, lots of things to learn.

Chaos Communication Congress

Speaking of lots of people and intimate feel. Chaos Communication
Congress
is, I think, the biggest gathering of all nerds and freaks in Europe,
yet being there feels quite at home. The best organized conference I've
been to. Friendly people showing their wares on their humble tables, 4
simultaneous tracks, huge building with intricate hallways. It's
cyberpunk, it's inclusive, it's about hardcore infosec topics, it's
about politics. Everything's there, everyone's there. 4 days of data
being constantly uploaded to your brain, on the waves of Club
Mate. Feels like an
extended holiday present, as it's happening in the last week of
December.

The Camps

Chaos Communication
Camp and
The Dutch Camp.
Imagine CCC, the Congress, but in the woods. Middle of nowhere,
multigigabit internet connection. sleeping in the tent, then going to a
world-class lecture. Both CCC, the camp, and The Dutch Camp, the camp,
are happening every 4 years, each of them taking alternating slots. So
every 2 years there is a camp somewhere. Did I mention that the location
changes every event ? Happy camping !

Summary

So go out there. Explore. Meet people. Learn. Have fun. None of the
above are much expensive and most of the events have a policy of "write
to us if you want to go but can't afford the ticket". Friendly people
fixing problems together.

It turns out that the last day of the year can be quite productive. I've
managed to sneak in a PCB layout for the input measurement and
protection board for my sunpowered
server . Got it
ordered, can't wait to test it ! I got carried away with via stitching
there a bit - we'll see how hard it will be to solder the larger
components because of that. The whole project is hosted
here - it's
open hardware so please do take a look.

Let's Encrypt is soon to be publicly
available service to provide TLS certificates for free and in automated
fashion. I'm helping them test their systems by participating in the
beta
program.
Because of that this site is now sporting, publicly recognizable
certificate from Let's Encrypt. Yay ! The work they are doing I believe
is of much importance. Lack of easy path for getting TLS certificate was
a major hurdle for the most of the website owners, otherwise keen on
getting their traffic encrypted. This, in turn, is important for two
reasons. Not allowing the content you are viewing on the internet to be
snooped at, not leaking you private data is one thing. Other, less
known, but as much important, is countering the ability of injecting any
malicious code/data into the responses from the servers you got and in
turn preventing lots of man in the middle attacks. Hopefully, when Let's
Encrypt becomes publicly available we would be on the path to much more
friendly internet for all.